A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY BEGINS

Evolution is true

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“I Don’t Want to Believe. I Want to Know.” ~ Carl Sagan

 

Another Arizona desert summer night was emerging below me. In the distance were the shimmering city lights of the Valley of the Sun, as far as the eye could see from my elevated dirt road at the foot of the McDowel mountains northeast of Phoenix. This was decades before the area became developed - about half-way between northern Scottsdale at the time and Fountain Hills. Nothing but clear skies of the desert, well before air pollution in the area became a problem. As a teenager, who in the coming months would be matriculating at the University of Arizona at age 17, I was developing some of those existential questions that many young people are bothered with. Where did we come from? What does it mean to be human? As we go about our lives are we not just like ants, I thought? Can there be any meaning and purpose to life? What is the basis for morality?

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This desert location would provide a place I could at least begin to formulate the questions to ask. Questions that people had for thousands of years pondered also, people much more intelligent than I. No wonder for millennia people have gone to desert areas to formulate some of life’s most important questions. But where to find answers?

 

How does a high school senior begin to find answers to questions like these? My parents did not seem interested. There were no philosophy courses or philosophy teachers at my high school. I didn’t even know there was an academic discipline called philosophy that dealt with such questions. For reasons I still have no explanations for, I decided at that young age to dedicate my life to searching for truths and to be honest, no matter where it led and at whatever cost. Was that naive? Arrogant? Little did I know that there would indeed be some high costs that would touch me in substantial ways. I did not know at that time of Sagan’s writings but his quote captures what I was thinking during those years.

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"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion,

however satisfying and reassuring."~ Carl Sagan

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In high school I had found science and in particular biology very satisfying. In the coming years my university biology education and biology teaching would supply more and better examples why we know evolution is true. To my complete surprise eventually most of those ultimate questions of life would not be answered by religion nor philosophy but instead by science and a better understanding of history. But much of that was decades and many life changes away.

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Veritas Super Omnia

 

Theologians and philosophers had thousands of years to answer so many of life’s questions but had failed or proposed answers that were demonstrably wrong. Origins slowly became my focus. Decades later my first web site would be called Origine and my motto Veritas Super Omnia (Latin: Truth, Above All) would be prominently displayed. Science provided sound answers to where we came from, when, from what, and how. These informed the why and gave answers to meaning and purpose, even if most people did not like them. 

 

As I entered into older age I realized my intellectual journey, especially focusing on selective origins, had arrived at a truth: The Theory of Evolution - “Macroevolution”- was true. From this realization profound consequences followed. How can this conclusion affect just about everything in our lives? This site is dedicated to this assertion, the evidence for the Theory of Evolution, and some important ramifications that follow.

 

I think I know what Sagan meant with that first quote about belief. The word believe can have several meanings. It can include to consider true, to hold an opinion such as 'suppose', or to have a firm conviction in regards especially to religious persuasion.  Sagan was probably referring to the latter. We don’t believe the sun will arise in the east tomorrow. We don’t hope it will.  We trust it will because we know from science why and how it appears to us in the east, what it is, how it formed and how old it is. And why it will continue to do so every day for another 4.5 billion years. We don’t hope that the airplane we will use tomorrow will fly; we trust it will because we know the engineers, the FAA in America, and pilot training that has gone into the industry. It’s not perfect but we also know it’s one of the safer modes of transportation. It’s not about belief; it’s trust built on evidence. I don’t want to just believe in evolution; I want to know why it's settled science and why except for a small group of scientists, the entire scientific community embraces it as is true.  In many cultures this type of curiosity and drive can isolate us from others who just want, need to believe or feel the evolutionary evidence is false. Some ideologies play such an important part in human societies. Those others often can include close family and friends.

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This is not a recounting of my journey of discovery regarding how the The Theory of Evolution is not only true but has profound impacts on us; that transit took decades of intellectual struggle and long lapses of deferred searching. Rather, this is what I found to be true in the end. A crucial truth that has sweeping consequences for most areas of our lives and our societies.

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